Hollywood's Faulty 'Memoirs'

Yoshizawa says he was dumbfounded by the choice to remove the story from its origins in Kyoto, for 1,200 years the Japanese capital, as famed for the elegance of its shamizen music as it is for the refinement of its geisha.

The artistry of the time period is largely absent from the film, says Yoshiko Wada, a Berkeley, Calif.,-based textile expert who was an assistant to costume designer Colleen Atwood.

The geisha world "had so much to do with music, dance and textiles," says Wada, who attended the Kyoto City University of Arts and curated a kimono exhibit at the Textile Museum here some years ago. The kimono and the obi -- the extraordinarily long, wide sash used to tie it -- "was one of the most important things, showing their taste, their status in society, their age, everything. . . . This film could have been made very opulent and meshed with that." But instead, she says, "they have kind of trashed it."

Wada describes the brocade on an obi worn by Sayuri at a key moment in the film. There was a waterfall and rocks -- so far so good. But there were also irises. "The iris is stretching it," Wada says. "We don't see the iris growing by a waterfall. It grows in still water."

The wave pattern for the water was wrong, too. It was a copy of a typical Japanese pattern used for ocean waves, says Wada, not for the kind of splashy action you would see around a cascade.

Not in a million years would a Western eye notice these things. So what's the big deal?

Wada laughs in acknowledgment. Yet that's why she was dismayed that her advice was not heeded. "All these things are important," she says. "We look at them and think it just looks strange." Atwood was not available for comment.

These may seem like minor matters, involving more bruised feelings than gross violations. But when it is your own heritage on the screen, the hurt cuts deeper.

"What if you saw an American flag that only had 42 stars? It's that important," says Sheridan Prasso, an Asia scholar and author of "The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient." Prasso also faults the casting of two Chinese actresses, Ziyi Zhang and Gong Li, and a Malaysian-born actress who has made her career in Chinese films, Michelle Yeoh, as the main Japanese characters. "It's only one step up from the use of Hollywood actors in yellowface that Hollywood used to do 50 years ago."

The casting has roused some degree of Chinese ire as well. Japan's English-language Mainichi Daily News reports that in a climate of ongoing Chinese-Japanese tension, the Chinese actors have been criticized in their homeland for portraying "an outlet for Japanese desires," as one observer put it.

In Japan, the film debuted last weekend as the fourth most popular nationwide. Criticisms seemed largely muted from filmgoers and critics.

"My concern before I saw the film was whether or not it would end up as a visual guidebook of Japan for foreign tourists; you know, all shots of Mount Fuji and geisha," said Yukichi Shinada, the noted Japanese film critic. "But the film did not go in that direction. I enjoyed the beautiful images and scenes for their cinematic pleasure. The fact that the Chinese actresses were there wasn't particularly troubling -- especially because they mostly spoke English."